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Samsung Producing NVMe PCIe SSDs
Samsung Electronics has started mass production of what it claims is the industry’s first Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) PCIe solid state drive (SSD), which has an M.2 form factor for use in PCs and workstations.
Samsung said in an announcement that it is “the first in the industry” to bring NVMe SSDs to OEMs for the PC market.
The SM951-NVMe operates at low power in standby mode and is the most compact of any NVMe SSD out there, according to the firm.
“Our new NVMe SSD will allow for faster, ultra-slim notebook PCs with extended battery use, while accelerating the adoption of NVMe SSDs in the consumer marketplace,” said SVP of memory marketing Jeeho Baek.
“Samsung will continue to stay a critical step ahead of others in the industry in introducing a diversity of next-generation SSDs that contribute to an enhanced user experience through rapid popularisation of ultra-fast, highly energy-efficient, compact SSDs.”
Samsung has added an NVMe version of the SM951 SSD after making a AHCI-based PCIe 3.0 version available since early January. This, Samsung said, will form an even stronger SSD portfolio.
The new NVMe-based SM951 SSD boasts a sequential data read and write speed of up to 2,260MBps and 1,600MBps respectively, while taking advantage of the firm’s own controller technology.
“These performance figures are the industry’s most advanced, with speeds four and three times faster than those of a typical SATA-based M.2 SSD which usually moves data at up to 540MBps and 500MBps respectively,” Samsung added.
The drive achieves these high speeds by using four 8Gbps lanes of simultaneous data flow. This allows for a data transfer rate of 32Gbps and a maximum throughput of 4GBps, giving the new drive a huge advantage over SATA-based M.2 SSDs, which can only transfer data at up to 600MBps.
When it comes to random read operations, the SM951-NVMe can process 300,000 IOPS operations, which is more than twice as fast as the 130,000 rate of its AHCI-based predecessor, Samsung said, while being more than three times faster than the 97,000 IOPS of a SATA-based SSD.
“Meeting all M.2 form factor requirements, the drive’s thickness does not exceed 4mm. [It] also weighs less than 7g, which is lighter than two nickels and only a tenth the weight of a 2.5in SSD. Capacities are 512GB, 256GB and 128GB,” Samsung explained.
Samsung said that the company plans to incorporate 3D V-NAND technology into its NVMe SSD line-up, which could see even higher densities and performance.
Earlier this week HP unveiled the HP Z Turbo Drive G2, a storage solution featuring Samsung’s NVMe SSDs to process large datasets.
The HP Z Turbo Drive G2 PCIe SSD is said to deliver four times traditional SATA SSD performance at a similar cost to previous devices. This will allow workstation users to “super-charge” the productivity and creativity of workflows, according to HP.
Are Cyber Criminals Hard To Catch?
Despite 100,000 cyber crimes being committed every year UK authorities only caught 12 hackers.
In fact on average just one person was convicted of an offence under the Computer Misuse Act every month for the past 23 years.
We assume that it was not the same bloke, because he would be the most luckless criminal ever.
Campaigners from the Digital Trust, which supports victims of online abuse, said police do not know how to cope with the problem.
Need more laws
Criminal justice expert Harry Fletcher, who is a director of the Digital Trust, said: “The police still concentrate their resources on traditional offences offline, but most people are more likely to be mugged online than in the street.
“The law needs to change. It should, for example, be an offence to use any technological device to locate, listen to or watch a person without legitimate purpose.
“In addition, restrictions should be placed on the sale of spyware without lawful reasons. It should also be against the law to install a webcam or any other form or surveillance device without the target’s knowledge.”
Of course just creating new laws is not going to mean that more hackers will be caught, it will just mean that there are more crimes which they could be arrested for.
The conviction rate against hackers are not bad, if the coppers do arrest someone. Between 1990 to 2006 only 183 defendants were proceeded against and 134 found guilty under the Computer Misuse Act.
Unfortunately the Trust did not see, to realize that a lot of the hacks against companies and individuals come from overseas, particularly Russian or China. Changing laws in the UK would not change anything.
Intel Sends Braswell SoC To Partners
Intel announced that it is now shipping the Bay Trail system on a chip (SoC) successor codenamed Braswell to OEM partners.
Announced almost exactly a year ago at Intel’s Developer Forum in Beijing, Braswell is a more powerful version of Bay Trail running on the 14nm fab process, designed to power low-cost devices like Chromebooks and budget PCs.
The chip maker said that devices will hit the market sometime in late summer or autumn.
“We expect Braswell-based systems to be available in the market for the back to school 2015 selling season,” an Intel representative told The INQUIRER. “Specific dates and options will be announced by our OEM partners.”
That’s all Intel will give us for now, but we were told that full details regarding the upcoming chip will be revealed at IDF in Shenzhen next week.
Braswell was expected to arrive at the end of 2014 when it was originally unveiled last year.
Kirk Skaugen, general manager of Intel’s PC Client group, said that it will replace Bay Trail as part of the Atom line, and will feature in over 20 Chromebook designs.
“Last year, we had only four designs on Chrome. Today I can announce that we will have over 20 designs on Chrome,” said Skaugen at the time.
Intel recently announced another 14nm chip, the Atom x range, previously codenamed Cherry Trail, although this will be focused on tablets rather than the value PC market segment and Chromebooks like Braswell.
In terms of power, Braswell is likely to fit snuggly above the Atom x5 and x7 Cherry Trail SoCs and beneath the firm’s recently announced 5th-generation Core products, previously codenamed Broadwell.
Unveiled at Mobile World Congress earlier this year, Intel’s Atom x5 and x7 chips, previously codenamed Cherry Trail, are also updates to the previous Bay Trail Atom line-up, being the first Intel Atom SoCs on 14nm.
These higher-powered SoCs are designed to bring improved 3D performance to mainstream premium handheld devices running full versions of Windows and Android, such as 7in to 10.1in tablets and 2-in-1 hybrid laptops priced at around $119 to $499.
For example, Microsoft quietly announced on Tuesday that the upcoming Surface 3 tablet-laptop hybrid will be powered by an Intel Atom x7. The device is priced at $500.
Intel Debuts The N3000 Series SoC
Intel has launched Intel N3000 series systems on a chip (SoCs), which will kill off Bay Trail-M and Bay Trail-D SoCs on the desktop and mobile PCs.
CPU World also has spotted some other chips which have been revealed to the world.
Intel has also launched desktop and mobile Core i3 and Pentium microprocessors. New mobile models are Pentium 3825U, Core i3-5015U and i3-5020U. These ones are based on Broadwell 14nm.
Core i3-5015U and i3-5020U are dual-cores with Hyper-Threading technology, HD 5500 graphics and ultra low 15 Watt TDP. The processors run at 2.1 GHz and 2.2 GHz. This is 100 MHz higher than the i3-5005U and i3-5010U models, that were launched three months ago.
The i3-5015U and i3-5020U chips offer a 50 MHz higher graphics boost. Official prices of these SKUs are $275 and $281.
The Pentium 3825U incorporates a couple of enhancements on the older Pentium 3805U. It supports Hyper-Threading that allows it to process twice as many threads. It also has base and maximum graphics frequencies increased to 300 MHz and 850 MHz.
The 3805U and 3825U operate at 1.9 GHz and have 2 MB L2 cache. The 3825U processor is rated at 15 Watt TDP, and priced at $161.
USB 3.1 Coming Later This Year
The emerging USB 3.1 standard is on track to reach desktops as hardware companies release motherboards with ports that can transfer data twice as fast as the previous USB technology.
MSI recently announced a 970A SLI Krait motherboard that will support the AMD processors and the USB 3.1 protocol. Motherboards with USB 3.1 ports have also been released by Gigabyte, ASRock and Asus, but those boards support Intel chips.
USB 3.1 can shuffle data between a host device and peripheral at 10Gbps, which is two times faster than USB 3.0. USB 3.1 is also generating excitement for the reversible Type-C cable, which is the same on both ends so users don’t have to worry about plug orientation.
The motherboards with USB 3.1 technology are targeted at high-end desktops. Some enthusiasts like gamers seek the latest and greatest technologies and build desktops with motherboards sold by MSI, Asus and Gigabyte. Many of the new desktop motherboards announced have the Type-C port interface, which is also in recently announced laptops from Apple and Google.
New technologies like USB 3.1 usually first appear in high-end laptops and desktops, then make their way down to low-priced PCs, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst of Mercury Research.
PC makers are expected to start putting USB 3.1 ports in more laptops and desktops starting later this year.
SUSE Brings Hadoop To IBM z Mainframes
SUSE and Apache Hadoop vendor Veristorm are teaming up to bring Hadoop to IBM z and IBM Power systems.
The result will mean that regardless of system architecture, users will be able to run Apache Hadoop within a Linux container on their existing hardware, meaning that more users than ever will be able to process big data into meaningful information to inform their business decisions.
SUSE’s Veristorm Data Hub and vStorm Enterprise Hadoop will now be available as zDoop, the first mainframe-compatible Hadoop iteration, running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z, either on IBM Power12 or Power8 machines in little-endian mode, which makes it significantly easier for x86 based software to be ported to the IBM platform.
SUSE and Veristorm have also committed to work together on educating partners and channels on the benefits of the overall package.
Naji Almahmoud, head of global business development for SUSE, said: “The growing need for big data processing to make informed business decisions is becoming increasingly unavoidable.
“However, existing solutions often struggle to handle the processing load, which in turn leads to more servers and difficult-to-manage sprawl. This partnership with Veristorm allows enterprises to efficiently analyse their mainframe data using Hadoop.”
Veristorm launched Hadoop for Linux in April of last year, explaining that it “will help clients to avoid staging and offloading of mainframe data to maintain existing security and governance controls”.
Sanjay Mazumder, CEO of Veristorm, said that the partnership will help customers “maximize their processing ability and leverage their richest data sources” and deploy “successful, pragmatic projects”.
SUSE has been particularly active of late, announcing last month that its software-defined Enterprise Storage product, built around the open source Ceph framework, was to become available as a standalone product for the first time.
IBM Debuts New Mainframe
IBM has started shipping its all-new first z13 mainframe computer.
IBM has high hopes the upgraded model will generate solid sales based not only on usual customer patterns but its design focus aimed at helping them cope with expanding mobile usage, analysis of data, upgrading security and doing more “cloud” remote computing.
Mainframes are still a major part of the Systems and Technology Group at IBM, which overall contributed 10.8 percent of IBM’s total 2014 revenues of $92.8 billion. But the z Systems and their predecessors also generate revenue from software, leasing and maintenance and thus have a greater financial impact on IBM’s overall picture.
The new mainframe’s claim to fame is to use simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) to execute two instruction streams (or threads) on a processor core which delivers more throughput for Linux on z Systems and IBM z Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) eligible workloads.
There is also a single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD), a vector processing model providing instruction level parallelism, to speed workloads such as analytics and mathematical modeling. All this means COBOL 5.2 and PL/I 4.5 exploit SIMD and improved floating point enhancements to deliver improved performance over and above that provided by the faster processor.
Its on chip cryptographic and compression coprocessors receive a performance boost improving both general processors and Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) cryptographic performance and allowing compression of more data, helping tosave disk space and reducing data transfer time.
There is also a redesigned cache architecture, using eDRAM technology to provide twice as much second level cache and substantially more third and fourth level caches compared to the zEC12. Bigger and faster caches help to avoid untimely swaps and memory waits while maximisng the throughput of concurrent workload Tom McPherson, vice president of z System development, said that the new model was not just about microprocessors, though this model has many eight-core chips in it. Since everything has to be cooled by a combination of water and air, semiconductor scaling is slowing down, so “you have to get the value by optimizing.
The first real numbers on how the z13 is selling won’t be public until comments are made in IBM’s first-quarter report, due out in mid-April, when a little more than three weeks’ worth of billings will flow into it.
The company’s fiscal fortunes have sagged, with mixed reviews from both analysts and the blogosphere. Much of that revolves around IBM’s lag in cloud services. IBM is positioning the mainframe as a prime cloud server, one of the systems that is actually what cloud computing goes to and runs on.
Will Intel Release Skylake This Year?
Intel has confirmed that it will release Core M processors this year based on its new Skylake chip design.
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet conference that the the new Core M chips are due in the second half of the year and will also extend battery life in tablets, hybrids, and laptop PCs.
The new chips will mean much thinner tablets and mobile PCs which will make Apple’s Air look decidedly portly. Intel’s Core M chips, introduced last year, are based on the Broadwell but the Skylake chips should also improve graphics and general application performance.
The Skylake chips will be able to run Windows 10, as well as Google’s Chrome and Android OSes, Krzanich said. But most existing Core M systems run Windows 8.1, and Intel has said device makers haven’t shown a lot of interest in other OSes. So most Skylake devices will probably run Windows 10. Chipzilla is expected to give more details about the new Core M chips in June at the Computex trade show in Taipei.
Skylake systems will also support the second generation of Intel’s RealSense 3D camera technology, which uses a depth sensor to create 3D scans of objects, and which can also be used for gesture and facial recognition. The hope is that the combination of Skylake and a new Windows operating system will give the PC industry a much needed boost.
In related news, Intel announced that socketed Broadwell processors will be available in time for Windows 10.
Are Flash Drives Becoming More Secure?
Flash drives in mobile devices are set to become faster and secure thanks to a new standard signed off by the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association.
eMMC version 5.1, will allow for a new mobile storage that will provide faster access. Flash drives based on eMMC 5.1 can handle 4K streaming and more data-intensive tasks.
Samsung has started making 64GB, 32GB and 16GB drives based on the new standard and is shipping units to customers, but has not said whether those drives will be used in the Galaxy S6 smartphone, which will be announced early next month at the Mobile World Congress trade show.
Samsung’s 64GB eMMC 5.1 has a random read performance of 11,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) and write performance of 13,000 IOPS, compared to a rough performance of 7,000 IOPS for 64GB drives based on the previous eMMC 5.0 standard.
The speed improvements comes through some cache and data-streaming improvements.
There is also something called Secure Write Protection ensures only specific entities are able to access files and lock or unlock storage.
Raspberry Pi Making Moves
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that its pint-sized computer has now sold a whopping five million units.
The announcement came via Twitter, where the official Raspberry Pi account boasted that the five million milestone makes it the big-selling computer manufacturer in the UK of all time.
Just confirmed the big news we’ve all been waiting for: we’ve now sold more than 5 million Raspberry Pis.
— Raspberry Pi (@Raspberry_Pi) February 17, 2015
We think that this means that in just under 3 years, we’ve gone from zero to being the biggest selling UK computer manufacturer ever. Yowza.
— Raspberry Pi (@Raspberry_Pi) February 17, 2015
This comes just two weeks after the firm announced sales of 4.5 million Raspberry Pi computers, suggesting that its latest model, the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, has proved popular since it went on sale on 2 February.
Raspberry Pi said previously that it aims to ship three million units of the new model within 12 months, and Tuesday’s announcement suggests that it’s on track to smash that target.
The firm has yet to announce exactly how many Raspberry Pi 2 models have shipped, but we are likely to hear official figures in the next few weeks.
The second-generation device was unveiled at the beginning of this month, improving on the original Raspberry Pi with 1GB RAM and support for Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system.
It also boasts expanded GPIO pins and advanced power management and connectivity, making it possible to connect up to four USB devices, including powered devices such as hard drives.